Norwegian students build a contemporary wooden sauna on the sea

Students from the Oslo School of Architecture and Design recently completed ‘The Bands,’ a larch-clad sauna and terrace built atop a rocky quay. Completed in just four weeks in Kleivan, Lofoten, Norway, the wooden structure was created as part of the students’ semester-long design/build project for the Scarcity and Creativity Studio. The contemporary building pays homage to the village’s early 20th century architecture by mimicking the silhouettes of three existing buildings located nearby.

The student project gets its name from its ribbon-like design that looks like three connected wooden bands individually rising to form three gabled shapes on one end, and stepping down towards the water on the other. The cabin-like volumes reference three of the quay’s traditional village buildings—a fisherman’s cottage, a cod liver oil production building, and a cod salting building—and are arranged to appear like three separate buildings; however, the structures are interconnected and house the small sauna, a wood-burning stove, and three built-in benches. Natural light floods the larch-lined interior through clerestory windows made of translucent polycarbonate plastic and a glazed gabled end wall framing views of the Norwegian mountains.

The students also built a spacious outdoor terrace with built-in benches, a dining table, and a sunken barbecue pit. An outdoor hot tub is located on a smaller terrace on the opposite end of the sauna. The 15-square-meter sauna building is part of an ongoing Art and Culture Production Centre development project that will also oversee the renovation of the quay’s three historic buildings.